Google has just unveiled its Chrome OS operating system during a press event at the company's headquarters, and it's pretty much exactly what we expected it to be: a streamlined Linux kernel booting straight into the Chrome web browser. The code is available starting today.

1) stating that a computer is mostly an interface to the Internet is VERY reductive. Stating that most of us will only use their computers to access the Internet is reductive as well. Those concepts already failed in the past.

Just because it failed in the past doesn't mean it will fail again in the future.

Looking at my wife's computer usage, this would be almost perfect. The only apps she uses are Mozilla Firefox, WordPerfect, and Picassa. 95% of all time spent on the computer is spent in Firefox. The rest is typing up the odd document, and pulling images off the digicam to post online.

There are a lot more of these kinds of people out there then you seem to think there are.

Will this be perfect or even usable by everyone? Doubtful. But for a large portion of the computing public, it just might be.

2) it's amazing how we fought for YEARS IE and the way it was so tightly integrated with underline OS. We complained it was insecure, prone to errors, causing instability AND a problem under anti-trust point of view? No-one noticed that Chrome Browser is doing what IE 5.5/6 was able to do (directly or via ActiveX plugins) more than 10 years ago? The concept that EVERYTHING could live inside a browser and people could use that framework to develop extensions to their desktop (besides regular full-fledged applications) was part of the... Windows98 development process! Then we spent 11 years trying to remove IE from Windows and now... we build another browser-centric OS?? Life is irony for sure ...

The big difference is that this is not a general-purpose OS with a crappy browser pre-installed and "integrated" in such a way that a naughty website can control the host OS.

This is a special-purpose device. You don't have access to "the OS". You have access to a browser. Very big difference.

3) According to what I read, Google has made lots of compromises in hardware, just the way Apple did. Basically, they will only support new systems and, probably, specifically crafted PCs. This inherently means they don't think they could aim to a large user base as they are kicking existing systems out as a start. Unfortunately, a PC is not a phone. And while a phone could be small PC, there's a lot of assumptions to do when you behave like this. If any of those is wrong, you could fail. After all, Google is no Apple and hasn't a loyal (yet small) user base.

Again, this is not a general-purpose computer, running a general-purpose OS, that can be used to do anything. Why aren't you complaining that this vehemently about the Kindle, since it's really nothing more than Adobe Reader tightly integrated into the OS, only running on specific hardware?

Seriously, take a step back, and look at this from the viewpoint of a special-purpose device running a customised OS. Nothing too different from an iPhone or iPod Touch, except that instead of having native apps, it's all web apps.